Wednesday, April 27, 2005

Time travel has always been appealing to me. I'd love to go back and meet my great grandfather, a Texas politician in the House who was also a voice teacher and a Baptist preacher. I am sure he was quite the character. He had a long history of public service before becoming a Rep. I'd like to meet him.

I'd like to see what Rome was like back in "the day". What was it like to live in that city? I'd like to see that.

I'd like to sit with my ancestor, David Price Thomas, who migrated from Ireland in the 1800's, and ask him all sorts of questions about people we don't know about and can't find. I'd like to meet him.

I would like to meet Jesus, of course, but I am profoundly glad to know I can have a relationship even today with his living presence. I'd also really like to meet John. I love the book of John and have always been fascinated by his close relationship with Christ. I'd like to sit at his feet and hear some stories.

Time travel. Could it also mean that I could snap my fingers and be at the beach instead of driving through the night? Yeah, I'd like one order of that, please...and hold the pickles.

Maddie is so funny about car trips. She loves them. She'll often ask, "Daddy, can we get in the car and go to sleep and drive somewhere?" How many of us have vivid memories of family trips in the car? We marvel at how more of us weren't killed by rolling around, unbelted, in the back seat. My place was leaning up between the seats listening to my parents converse. I didn't want to miss anything, you know. My father would play the harmonica and drive me crazy. Harmonicas can be quite cool. Just not for hours on end. Sheryl remembers her sister drawing a line on the seat and telling her not to cross into her space. I'm sure many of you have similar memories.

Please pray for us as we drive the 8 hrs to the beautiful white sand and blue green oceans. Pray that we'll stay awake. Pray that we don't kill each other. We're excited for rest and relaxation. Have a great week, friends!

Do these images of car travel prompt any memories? I'd love to hear some.

12 comments:

Brandon, what do you think about using portable DVD players in the car for trips like this? Is it robbing the kids of some of those great memories and making them drones to the screen, or since ours are so young and can't read, it's something that our parents would have used as well?

I am an only child so I don't have most of the memories you all will share about road trips. I do specifically remember a trip with my mom and our black cockerspaniel, Alfie. The three of us were in my mom's little Nissan truck (not much room in those itty bitty things) and the words, "MOM, HE'S TOUCHING ME!!!!!" actually came out of my mouth. Wow, that's kind of embarassing to admit.

We traveled a lot when I was a kid. We had an old moterhome. Two immediate memories come to mind. One is of my older brother and sister holding me down, covering my eyes and then describing cool things they were seeing. "Hey, look at that beautiful deer! Wow, see the waterfall?" When I finally managed to squirm away and get to the window they would say, "O man, you just missed it." The other memory is of my dad never being able to sleep the night before we left. We would plan to leave early the next morning, but he would end up loading us into the moterhome in the middle of the night. I would sleep in my clothes because I knew this would happen. I'd go to sleep in my own bed and wake up for breakfast six hours away from home. Good times. Enjoy your trip and pray for us while you're on the beach.

I remember a trip in 1980 through Florida with my family in a Chevy Citation. My brother and I evidently fought the first 4 days of the trip. At some point, my mother (a fiery red-head herself) turned around and proclaimed, "_I_ am going to have a good time on this trip if it means I have to put you two on a plane to go back home!!!" I guess we were afraid she would do it, because I think it got better from there!

Oh yeah, lots of car trip memories. One I don't have so much as being told the story, is one time our family got up way before the crack of dawn. My sister and I were supposed to continue to sleep with the backseat down. Apparently, we didn't want to sleep and were fighting and making trouble, but as soon as we stopped, put the seat up and buckled in we were fine. Then there was the time my sister got sick in middle TN (thankfully we had time to stop for her to puke out the door). Plenty of stories.

Some of the best memories were learning how to read maps and calculate gas mileage. We also played (still do, actually) Trivial Pursuit - me and mom vs. Heather and daddy - with just the questions until we got tired of playing - all the questions on a every card. When we were younger, we had homemade crossword and find-a-word puzzles that we made on the computer before a trip. I'm sure when we were really little we just played with toys or slept. I can guarantee that my parents wouldn't have had a DVD player.

I actually whined that my brother was LOOKING at me! We had "No Man's Land" between the two of us and when we were getting along, we would sit in the tiny spaces between the front seat and back seat (in the floor). Daddy, Mother, Mike and I would get 15 minutes each of the radio station we liked. Of course, Mother and Daddy agreed on their time and got 30 minutes!!

are you coming to mobile? if so, come visit us at port city church of christ, 2901 hillcrest rd, mobile, al. i heard that one of your members visited us last week. he is here for the opera (?). not sure what was meant by that, but i heard that he(?) is here fo the opera and will be here for the weekend, too. i think?

when i was little (circa 1990. thats just for you brandon ;p ) when my brothers and i would as how much longer the trip would be, my parents told us how many "inspector gadget" shows it was. it was one of my favorite cartoons at the time (gotta love old school nickelodeon) and lasted thirty minutes. so, for a 3 hour trip, it would start out nine inspector gadget shows until we got there. this post just made me think of that.

also, on long lnog trips (ie driving to colorado for skiing) my parents would give us ten dollars a day of driving to start off, and every time they had to call us out, we got a dollar taken away. that seemed to work pretty well.

I remember my mother making the backseat of our Oldsmobile Cutlass one big "mattress" by stuffing pillows, padding, blankets, etc in the footwells. That way my sister and I could both lay down to sleep instead of sitting up and then waking up cranky with stiff necks. We played the alphabet game and would keep a list of all the different state license plates we saw. My sister and I also had the drawn lines and no man zones in the backseat. She's touching me and/or looking at me was quite a common thing. Being the older one, I'm pretty sure I instigated most of it. I think my mother would have been all over the portable DVD thing. Of course we would have to of had at the very least two screens or two players since we couldn't share anything back then. I also remember looking forward to eating in restaraunts since we so seldom did that when I was a kid.

Side note - my great-grandfather was a Kansas politician, Republican in the State House of Representatives and an elder and possibly (not sure) sometimes preacher at the Parsons CofC in Parsons, KS. I too would like to have known him, to talk to him. We have some of his writings, legislative and personal. Very cool. We have a letter he wrote to my grandmother urging her to be careful in considering a smoking, drinking soldier as her choice of husband. She married the smoking, drinking soldier a couple of weeks later in front of a justice of the peace and a couple of witnesses. That soldier was my grandfather and they were married for over forty years!

One of our best family experiences was our move and subsequent drive from the west coast to the east coast. We did the trip in about 10 days. We stopped whenever and wherever. We stayed with friends along the way and a few hotels as well. We made a point to investigate any of those crazy "tourist" sight-seeing things you see on a trip and are always too much in a hurry to stop.

As far as the question posed by phil . . . we used a tv/vcr combo a few times and the kids loved it.

During my dad's first youth ministry job (Lovington, New Mexico in the early '70s), the church gave him an old bus we called "The Gospel Chariot." My dad took all the seats out and we took it camping. I remember my brother and me in sleeping bags in the back munching Cheese Nips. Now camping in a bus seems like such a white trash thing to do but at the time it was a lot of fun. The Gospel Chariot eventually died and I remember my dad grieving for some time...

We would take road trips every year to Gulf Shores, Al, which was about 8 hours away. One of our favorite things to do on our vacations was to hunt sand crabs. I remember one year we decided to take a couple back home and try to keep them alive as long as we could. Well, me and my sister, being the terrific 7 and 8 year olds that we were, decided to play with the crabs on the way home. It was a great idea until one got away from us in the car.

haha We searched and searched for that thing, but we never found it. We still get a good laugh out of that one.